


a little bit fairy tale

by pipistrelle



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Domestic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Is Alive, Everyone's Queer Married in Space, Family, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, OT3, Silly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 10:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 44
Words: 13,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/572272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a big, strange universe; but then, they're a pretty strange family. A collection of  roughly 500-word drabbles, mostly canon-compliant, taking place mostly between s5 and s6. Will eventually contain every relationship ever, but generally not romance-oriented.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the fox as shepherd

“Go,” the Doctor says, or “Stay,” and they go or they stay, because he’s the Doctor, and he’s wonderful.

And he saves planets and swans around and runs and hands Rory things, attach that there, don’t drop it, this next bit is very wibbley; he leans on Amy in great rib-cracking hugs, don’t do that to me again, Pond, you gave me quite a scare. He always knows what to do, and everything turns out fine.

And in his wonderfulness he lies to them, and he locks them in the TARDIS, and he waits days – _days_ – to save Amy from the Silence, days that Rory spends hunched over like an old man, curled around the little blinking ember in his hand that calls and cries and begs for help in his wife’s voice.

And Rory never fights, never disobeys, because he trusts the Doctor. He loves the Doctor. But in moments of alienness, when the Doctor moves at strange angles and won’t look Amy in the eye, Rory finds himself reaching for her hand, as if to pull her back.

And when Amy and the Doctor each tell him to look after the other one, it isn’t a difficult choice.


	2. the fox as shepherd

A few hours after they barely make it out of the Marquis of Confusion’s wedding alive, Rory comes up behind the Doctor in the console room and grabs the back of his jacket.

“Rory,” the Doctor says, slow and careful. Then Rory’s grip moves to his upper arm and he swings the Doctor around, and the Doctor’s taller than Rory, and probably stronger ( _Time Lord_ ), but it doesn’t seem like that will help him. “Something wrong?”

“What happened back there, in the engine bay,” Rory says. “With Amy. You can’t do that again.”

The Doctor is beginning to feel the pressure of Rory’s strength not on his arm but on his timesense; the door has opened in Rory’s head, the Doctor can feel it, can feel the weight of two thousand years of living and dying.  That age is pointed at him now, balanced on a sword-point between his hearts. _Menacing_ him, in a quiet, polite, Rory sort of way that is no less menacing for all that.

The Doctor thinks about what happened in the engine bay, when Amy went to disarm the fusion chambers. He thinks about what Rory must have felt, running up to tell them about the deaths on the ship above, arriving only to see the last glint of the engine fires on Amy’s hair as she vanished down the ladder into darkness.

“She volunteered,” the Doctor says quietly.

“You sent her,” Rory says, just as quietly. “And she nearly died.”

“Yeah, well, we do a lot of that, nearly dying,” the Doctor snaps. “I can’t always keep both of you safe.”

“I know that. I just want _you_ to know, Doctor – if something happens to her, it won’t be just yourself you have to answer to.”

The Doctor meets his gaze for a long moment, then nods.

Rory lets him go, and the Doctor can feel the door in Rory’s head close, locking the Lone Centurion away again. The millenia fall from his face, leaving only shell-shock and exhaustion – and something else, something the Doctor can’t place. Then Rory quietly asks “Are you hurt?”, and the Doctor’s hearts crack, because some part of him is already steeled to face Rory’s rage and grief someday, but Rory’s steadfast love will make it so much worse.

“I’m okay,” he says. Rory accepts the lie with a nod and heads down to the pool to find his wife.


	3. sleeping beauty

Late afternoon sunlight pours in through the huge windows of the British Museum’s main gallery, casting the Pandorica in low fire. Rory Williams, security guard, nineteen hundred and seven years atoning and not yet forgiven, tries his best to keep out of the light as he comes through on his daily rounds; he gets uneasy with the sun in his eyes. It’s something he hasn’t been able to shake since Rome.

It’s an ordinary Tuesday, and the gallery is empty. Rory takes advantage of the quiet to pace carefully around the Pandorica, inspecting it for cracks, as he’s done at least once a day for nineteen hundred and seven years. Today, like every day, each heavy black face is implacable as ever, and he isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. Either way, he’s just considering slipping under the velvet rope to tell Amy about his day when a small group of teenagers enter the gallery, their voices echoing strangely in the high space. Rory slips unobstrusively into a side room and pretends to inspect a stone Dalek, thinking to wait until they’ve gone.

He can’t help overhearing them, though, as they pause to gape at the Pandorica. “Look at that weird pattern,” one girl says. “I wonder what it means?”

 _It means everything._ Rory drifts over to a cluster of plaster penguins, and in the beam of sunlight from a nearby window he swears he can see the reflective glint of a mirror, and beyond that white pillars and the Venetian sky. Suddenly the air seems to reek of ash and fish and perfume. He nearly smiles.

“It’s beautiful,” one of the visitors says. Rory turns to look back at the Pandorica, and in its smooth side he sees the opaque black surface of the Leadworth duck pond, the night he ran out of Amy’s house in a panic after Mels let his secret out – the night Amy chased after him, shouting his name, until finally she caught up to him at the duck pond with no ducks and everything changed.

Quietly, more to himself than the girl who’d spoken, he says “Oh, you’ve no idea.”


	4. wise through experience

After their narrow escape from the Plutonian bat-gargoyles, they go to an intergalactic funfair on Sirius IV. Amy has a marvelous time for about an hour, then looks up from a game of laser croquet to notice that Rory has vanished.

She leaves the Doctor in the petting zoo and walks out of the cluster of carousels and game-booths, up through the rising hills of reddish grass towards the TARDIS. Rory is sitting there, his back to the wondrous time machine, his head buried in his hands, a picture of perfect misery.

Amy sighs and flops down next to him, stretching her legs out in the grass. He doesn’t even twitch. She tries to wait him out, but after a minute or two of despairing silence she gets bored and gives up. “You’ve snogged the Doctor, haven’t you?”

That makes him jump. He looks up at her with panic in his eyes. “I – I didn’t mean to, I swear, it just –sort of happened –”

“And now you’re sulking, because it was amazing but also kind of bizarre, and he’s brilliant and wonderful but you’re not sure if he’s really real, not the way that other things are real. And he’s not human, so you don’t know if it meant anything to him, or the same as it meant to you – if you even knew what it meant to you. Which you don’t. And you’re a bloke, and so’s he, so I expect you feel your manhood’s threatened, or something. And you sort of think it’ll never happen again, but you want it to. A lot. And him being a beautiful bloody idiot all the time isn’t helping.”

Rory gapes at her. “I’m not – I’m not threatened,” he chokes out. 

“Well, the rest of it’s true then, yeah? And you’re all hot and bothered because of it.”

“How did you know?” He looks genuinely amazed.

“How d’you think?” Amy smirks at the cascade of emotions that cross his face – befuddlement, realization, dismay, resignation. She leans over and pecks him on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she says, “it’ll get better. Well, not really, but you’ll get used to it. And in the meantime… you’re not exactly out of options, are you?”

She lets that sink in for a minute, then stands and stretches and heads into the TARDIS, leaving him alone with his (no doubt very interesting) thoughts.


	5. the girl who wanted to be always young

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Central Park scene in "The Angels Take Manhattan". Vaguely spoilerish.

“Never show the damage,” River had said. “Never let him see you age.”

Amy had done enough fretting about the lines around her eyes and on her hands, the ugly round reading glasses, and the rest. She might have fussed about them much more if there hadn’t always been Rory around to insist that she was the most beautiful creature alive. Amy knew that such blatant flattery probably shouldn’t make her so happy, but it did, and after a while she’d finally got to the point where having Rory think she was beautiful was enough.

And then they were lounging in Central Park with the Doctor, and he took one look at her and blanched like a ghost had walked over his grave.

She was grown up. She’d made peace with that, finally, after years of struggle – or at least she thought she had. But that moment of pain that flashed across the Doctor’s face struck her like lightning, and for a moment she felt an ember within her leap into flame – she wanted to plunge back into the wildness, the wonder, the chase, the flight – to be twenty again and let loose, fragile, dangerous, untouchable – to be young like the Doctor was, forever.

She saw now how little peace there was in that youth, but in that moment, if she could have, she’d have gone back to it for him.


	6. the confession

The Ponds are breakfasting on a bench in the pastry garden when the Doctor dashes in from the wardrobe, waving his hands and shouting. “Amy! There you are. Been looking everywhere. Amelia!” He  stumbles to a halt in front of the bench and takes a deep breath, trying to compose himself. He stands with his fingers laced across his stomach for a moment, enduring Amy’s expectant look, then announces, “I love you!”

Rory drops his cheese Danish into the grass, feeling a flush of heat rise to his face. “ _What?_ ”

“Rory! Roranicus Pondicus! I love you as well!” The Doctor’s beaming, very pleased with himself. He glances back and forth between them. “Are we all clear, then?”

“I, I don’t –” Rory begins, but he’s saved from having to continue by Amy’s indignant interruption.

“Well, that’s all well and good, Doctor, but you couldn’t have told us last night, when we were about to get chomped on by a huge alligator beast?”

“That’s the thing, see, I don’t always say it when I should,” the Doctor says. “There’ve been mix-ups, with humans, so I thought it’d be good to have it all covered, for emergencies. It seems to be quite important that I say it out loud, so I have. That’s new.” He’s got that distracted, inward smile on again, the one he usually saves for repairing the TARDIS. “I should have done it ages ago. It’s quite fun, this caring lark.”


	7. her only trick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have made no attempt to fit this into River's chronology. It's just... in there somewhere.

“Wait,” the Doctor says, spinning around in mid-run, nearly causing the young woman following him to fall as she tries to avoid a crash. He narrows his eyes at her as she stops to catch a breath, brushing her curls impatiently out of her face. “You really are Melody Pond -- River Song?” he asks.

“Yes, of course I am,” she pants. “You know perfectly well it’s me!”

“And you _work_ here,” the Doctor says.

“Yes! That’s my department over there, look.” She points down a dark side hallway. “I’m a lecturer in archaeology. That’s why I called you, these artifact acquistions are shady, I think the Neptune Congress is involved --”

“An archeological mystery?  That’s all? No tricks, no surprises, no… secrets?” the Doctor asks, his eyebrows vanishing skeptically into the cloudbank of his hair.

“What are you babbling about, Doctor?” River asks. She’s young, almost as young as he’s ever seen her, and incredulity makes her eyes shine. “Why would I keep secrets from you, of all people?”

“Right,” the Doctor sighs, and turns, straightening his coat. “Of course. Silly me. It’s just difficult to recognize you when you aren’t being… _mysterious_.”


	8. bargain not to become angry

The Quard Empire has decimated three populated moons and is set to launch a fleet of black hole generators at the mother planet, which will undoubtedly kill billions of people across three species and send intelligent life in this star system back to the Dark Ages. But that isn’t why the Doctor almost destroys them.

No, the Doctor nearly destroys them because halfway through an exhausting argument the Quard High Warlord suddenly says “Your friends, Doctor,” and motions to the doors of the control room, where a pair of guards are dragging Amy and Rory in. For a long moment all the Doctor can see is his Amy and Rory, his Ponds, his _friends_ , being dragged in chains across the floor, fresh from the prison cells no doubt. One of Amy’s eyes is swollen, and a dark bruise is beginning to spread across her face. When the guards haul them to their feet, the Doctor can see that Rory’s limping. And for one black second, the world-ending rage flares up in him like the first flash of a supernova, ready to incinerate these insects for daring to hurt the people he loves.

Then he looks into their faces, Amy’s hopeful, Rory’s patient and weary, and he sees himself in them as he should be – sees that they’re waiting for him to save everyone and pull a happy ending out of nowhere so they can all go home. So he does.

Lately he’s been wondering whether Amy and Rory are really risking their lives to save others, or if they’re doing it to save _him_ , so that in exchange he’ll save (or not destroy) everyone else. Whether they know that he uses their love to keep himself on a leash, that this is how it always has to be; that he keeps and risks companions, gambling with the lives of friends, so that he won’t go mad and cold the way the old Time Lords did.

He wonders if they’d stay, if they really understood. He wonders whether he’s a risk they’d be willing to take.


	9. staying with a friend in rainy weather

The TARDIS lands with a _thump_ , and the Doctor sighs in relief as he opens the doors. Outside is a clifftop overlooking a harbor, with a mercury sea washing against black stone jetties under a foggy green sky. A dirt path runs right past the TARDIS, leading up to a distant lighthouse with its windows all ablaze. The beacon darts out like a great silver needle into the gathering darkness of twilight.

The Doctor doesn’t see the dim figure coming down from the lighthouse until she calls out to him. “Temporofluxation storm in the delta quantum waveform? Need to ground the TARDIS for a few hours of objective time to wait it out?”

“Oh dear,” the Doctor says softly.

River moves into the soft glow of the TARDIS lights. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” she says, grinning.

The Doctor glares at her. “I was set for Earth,” he says accusingly. “Thirtieth Century, when they clone Cleopatra and get mammoths to fly.”

“Yes, you were, but Sexy and I had a chat and decided you’d better come here instead.”

“ _Sexy!_ You don’t – you can’t call her – my _TARDIS_ \--!” the Doctor splutters.

“Oh, don’t fuss, Doctor, she doesn’t mind. Are you coming in? I’ve got everything laid out for dinner. It’s a bit of a backwater planet, but they make a wonderful wine.” The Doctor stands in stubborn silence for a minute, until finally River rolls her eyes and sighs “Oh, come on now, I’m not going to ravish you. Although -- remember that quantum storm excuse, it comes in handy later. Now, are you coming?”

“Why should I?” the Doctor asks.

River’s expression softens a bit. “You’re grounded for a little while, and you could spend it with someone who cares about you, instead of moping about on your own. Don’t you think that’s worthwhile?”

“I don’t mope,” the Doctor grumbles, but he steps out of the TARDIS. The doors swing shut behind him on their own.

“Just a few hours,” River coaxes, beginning to smile again. “Care to make them interesting?”

The Doctor doesn’t answer, but when she offers her arm, he takes it and walks with her up the cliff into the gathering night.


	10. another matter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Jenny/Vastra chapter.

Jenny arranges larks’ hearts daintily on a tray, piles another tray with treats for the human gentry, and carries both into the small party in the drawing room. As soon as she enters, she looks for Vastra, and sees that lantern-jawed captain leaning far too close, all but stroking the scales on the back of her lady’s green hand.

Jenny sets the human tray aside and bears the larks’ hearts directly over to the Silurian, presenting them with a little courtesy. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, ma’am,” she says, and is pleased to see the captain pull back to a proper distance, his smile fading as his creeping hand drops back to his side. “If it isn’t too much trouble, a matter urgently requiring milady’s attention has arisen in the kitchen." 

Vastra tilts her head, curious. Not for the first time, Jenny silently thanks the Lord for the Silurian’s difficulty with human expressions. “Very well,” Vastra says at last. “Do excuse me, Captain.”

She follows Jenny to the door. As soon as they’re out of the sight of the guests, Vastra’s long tongue flicks out over Jenny’s shoulder, snapping a lark’s heart off the tray. She swallows it in a single gulp. “Is something wrong? Has there been word from the Yard?” she asks as they enter the kitchen, well out of earshot of the guests.

“No word,” Jenny says, setting the tray down on the counter. 

“It isn’t the Doctor again, is it? I swear, that man can’t stay out of trouble –”

“Actually, ma’am, it’s another matter entirely,” Jenny says, reaching out to take Vastra’s hand. The tiny scales are rough and radiate heat against her palm, like a pebbled shore warmed by the summer sun. “I didn’t like how close that man was standing to you,” Jenny says, her eyes downcast.

“Oh, he’s a man, is he?” Vastra asks, feigning surprise. Jenny scowls, and Vastra laughs. “Only joking, my dear. There’s no mistaking that one. But,” she places one claw under Jenny’s chin and lifts her head. “I’ll be sure to keep away from him in future if it upsets you. Mammals! You’re so territorial!”

“It’s a failing in us, m’lady,” Jenny agrees, and smiles.


	11. the old woman as troublemaker

The console room is quiet after the Ponds have gone to bed. That thing, that ‘going to bed’ thing, is one of the aspects traveling with humans that took some getting used to, but the Doctor has grown fond of it. It creates a coda of peace after the hectic chaos that invariably springs up wherever the TARDIS lands.

“Did you know,” he says aloud to the time rotor, “there’s a civilization in the Golden Crescent of Centauri 6 that never lets a government last for more than seventy-seven years? They’ll overthrow it themselves if it doesn’t collapse. Good kings, bad kings, theocracies, democracies, oligarchies, elephantgarchies. They believe the chaos is good for the soul of the people.”

The TARDIS grinds her rotors agreeably. Of course she knows; she knows more about the universe than him, having been a rusted-out clunker when the Doctor was being loomed. She dwelt in the TARDIS decks beneath the Eye of Harmony, at the center of all their whirling and stagnation. She knows how to handle age and space as nothing fully living, not even a Time Lord, truly can. She knows how to counteract the rot that stillness breeds on age. 

Out of all the available universe, she distills the chaos that is good for the soul.

“Not where we want to go, but where we need to be,” the Doctor whispers, softly, lovingly. He twangs a lever, and the rotor glows. “Tell me, dear, where do we need to be next?”


	12. the girl who is spinning the thread of fate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiles for "The Angels Take Manhattan".

“All right,” Rory says, settling his glasses higher on his nose. It’s a habit he acquired immediately, as soon as he started needing the glasses. As though he’d been born for it. “It’s time.”

There is a sense, Amy feels, in which the last thirty years have not been real. There is a part of her -- quiet and toothless now, but still to be heard murmuring softly in low moments – that is still waiting for the Doctor to come back and whisk her away, back to a self three decades younger and twenty years in the future. There is still a chance, she can’t help thinking, that all these years can be unwritten.

Not anymore. Rory’s right. _The Angel’s Kiss: A Melody Malone Story_ is edited, proofed, all laid out shiny and new, every particular ready to go to print, except this. The final page.

She sits at the typewriter and closes her eyes, trying to breathe in the autumn scent, feel the sun on her shoulders, hear the roar of cars in that ancient future.

“Here,” Rory says, setting a cup of tea down on the desk and handing her the huge, round-frame reading glasses she hasn’t used in years. “Thought you might need these.”

Amy smiles at him, slips the glasses on, and starts to write the last page of the rest of her life.


	13. carrying part of the load

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place at the end of the "The Eleventh Hour," about eighteen hours after the Doctor leaves for his quick trip to the moon.

Based on Mels’ phone call, Rory had expected to be threading his way through flaming wrecks and screaming chaos on the narrow Leadworth lanes – but then again, even at twenty, he’s still pretty sure he has unrealistic expectations of what things like ‘going on a bender’ really mean. And he really should have learned by now to take everything Mels says with a pound of salt.

He eventually finds the location she'd given him – ‘by the ditch with the trees behind that bar with the great coconut drinks’, real helpful. The sun is just rising as he pulls over on the side of the road, carefully avoiding the ditch, and climbs out of the car. His foot hits an empty beer bottle, sending it tumbling down into the inch of brackish water at the bottom.

Amy is sitting on the other side of the ditch, resting her head on her pulled-up knees, her hair flaming the same shade as the sky. Rory picks his way carefully over what seems like a minefield of empty bottles and sits beside her. 

“You said you were okay, after he left,” he ventures.

She shrugs, and speaks into her knees. “I lied.”

“It’s been a weird day for everyone,” Rory says. “You can be freaked out, or angry. It’s okay.”

She turns her head enough to glare at him with one bloodshot eye. “You don’t understand. You can’t even – don’t even pretend you know what it’s like to have him disappear again.”

“I know what he means to you,” Rory says quietly. “You can tell me about it, you know. I don’t think you’re mental.”

Amy doesn’t answer, but after a moment she raises her head, wipes her eyes on her sleeve, and grabs his hand.


	14. curing a sick lion

On the Ceres oil platform, the Doctor loses track of Rory and doesn’t go looking for him until after the earthquake, and only then because the oilmen have started talking about an alien doctor on the drilling rig being stupid and foolhardy. The Doctor is puzzled by this, since he’s in the control room, so he can’t be on the drilling rig. Can he?

He isn’t, but Rory is. When the Doctor gets there, Rory’s up high on the drilling rig, elbow-deep in the thorax of one of the huge tentacled minebeasts. The beast is still breathing, huge gasps that make its flanks swell and subside like a wave on the open sea. Chlorine rises in yellow wisps from its wound – not a wound, an _incision_ – and Rory’s wearing the top half of a pressure suit, already stained with chlorine and black alien bile.

The Doctor waits until Rory’s finished, climbed down the rig, and shucked the half-suit onto the deck before he speaks. “You could’ve killed it.”

“Obviously I don’t know much about minebeast physiology, but it’s not hard to tell that if something’s punctured and leaking air, you should probably patch it up,” Rory retorts. “I’m a bit rattled right now, Doctor, so if you could not tell me how stupid I am, that would be lovely. Thanks.”

He is rattled; he’s shaking. “It could’ve killed _you_ ,” the Doctor says.

“Yeah, and I could’ve just let it die, could I? I’m a nurse,” Rory snaps. He pauses, then adds, “To _everything_.”

“I know,” the Doctor says, and pulls him in for a hug.


	15. beloved of women

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna lie, this is one of my favorites so far.

“Rory!” the Doctor shouts, bursting through the library doors in a high-velocity whirlwind of tweed. He hits the couch Rory is reading on, tumbles over it, and ends up sitting on the carpet at Rory’s feet. “Rory, you’re human, you’ve been Roman, been around a bit. I have a question for you. About girls.”

Rory sets his book aside. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You know, girls. Human girls. With… girly…stuff. Things.”

Rory waits, but the Doctor doesn’t elaborate. “Going to need a little more, actually,” he prompts.

“Right. I just – well. Is this how they normally act, human girls? First it was River, and now – it’s Amy. She’s kissed me again. Well.” He pauses. “Mostly.”

Rory’s forehead creases as he tries to follow the Doctor’s babbling. “Amy mostly kissed you?”

“No, the kissing was mostly Amy’s fault. I helped.” Another pause. “A little.”

“A little?”

“Mostly a little.”

“Right.” Rory pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes for a second, largely to shut out the Doctor’s bewildered puppy-dog expression. It’s very…distracting. “Hang on, I thought you’d travelled with women before? Amy said there have been lots of them.”

“Yes, but I’ve never been in this body before, what if it’s something about this body? I was just wondering if it was a thing, if it’s some normal aspect of human female behavior that I should write down somewhere for future notice, like a sticky note or something: ‘Warning, when picking up companions, remember they are programmed to find the nearest Time Lord and – mmph!”

It’s an awkward kiss, which Rory blames on the fact that it’s not exactly easy to kiss someone whose head is at the level of your knees. But then the Doctor starts mostly helping, and Rory’s too distracted to worry about it anymore.

“All right, not a girl thing, then,” the Doctor says as Rory pulls away. “Just a human thing?”

“Could be,” Rory says, going back to his book.


	16. the danced-out shoes

Somehow the Doctor ends up carrying both pairs of shoes; his shiny black loafers tied together by the laces and slung over one shoulder, and Amy’s bright yellow heels, because she refused to climb the stairs while wearing them and wouldn’t leave them behind.

The noise of the party follows them faintly up to the top of the tallest tower. Stepping out into the warm spring night, they can see the lanterns dappling the garden below, and the white gazebo where they’d left a drunken Rory to snore in peace. The Doctor leans on the parapets and Amy settles next to him, her shoulder warm against his.

“You’re a terrible dancer,” she says after a moment.

“So are you,” the Doctor counters.

“Not like you! I swear, it’s like watching a drunken giraffe trying to get about.”

The Doctor snorts with laughter. “Really, Pond, a giraffe?”

“Yeah, you’re all legs and wobbly neck – oh, shut up, you know what I mean,” Amy says, elbowing him affectionately.

He taps the shoe hanging against his chest. “I’ll have you know that it’s impossible to dance badly in these. They were a birthday present from Fred Astaire.”

“Ooh, can we go meet him?” Amy asks.

“Well, I do owe him a great deal of…” the Doctor trails off at the look on her face. “All right, we’ll go and see him. First thing in the morning, eh?”

But first, while they’re waiting for Rory to sleep off his three whiskeys, they test the magic shoes in the console room until Amy is satisfied (though she refuses to let the Doctor try on her heels).


	17. i knew you were coming

Amy wakes on the floor of the cargo bay, breathless and burning to ashes in the harsh white lights. The Doctor is on his knees beside her, doing something frantic with the sonic, but she can’t see what because there’s blood everywhere – her blood, on his hands, on the screwdriver, on the floor, more blood than she thought she could hold, and it’s still oozing from the gash in her side. She dimly remembers the big alien bug coming at her with a sword, but the Doctor had left –

She must have croaked his name, because he raises his head to look at her, his face chalk-white and his eyes wide. “Don’t worry, Pond, I’ve got you,” he says. “I told you I’d come back.”

“Knew you would,” she rasps, then shudders at a stab of pain. “Knew you wouldn’t leave – the ship, the moon –”

“And you,” he says – almost growls – and he stops sonicking for a minute to lean over so he’s almost lying on the floor at her side. He presses his forehead to hers, soft as a kiss, and a burst of warmth drives away the pain for a moment. “Remember that, Amelia. Believe it,” he breathes. “I will always come back for you.”


	18. sunlight carried into the windowless house

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This follows the events of the previous chapter, "i knew you were coming".

“Good,” the Doctor says, to no one in particular, although he feels about as far from good as it’s possible to feel. The hot white lights of the cargo deck are beating down on him; the floor and his hands and the knees of his trousers are sticky with blood – Amy’s blood. That’s worse than extremely very not good.

But she’ll be all right now, he’s almost certain. The wound is closed, the skin regenerated, and all that’s left now is to get her back home, safe to the TARDIS, and then do something about the awful deathly white color of her skin, because she shouldn’t ever be this waxy and still, not his bright burning Amy, blood loss or no.

She’s tall, almost as tall as he is (has he not noticed that before? That’s criminal, not noticing something like that), but he’s strong for a skinny bloke and he carries her easily, through corridors full of startled space marines to a broom cupboard. 

The TARDIS is waiting, cold and dark, with no light in the windows; her engines are cut to conserve power, after the radiation belt wounded her on the way in. 

But he can feel the telepathic field still active, can feel it reach out to him, playing over his surface thoughts and nudging anxiously at the lifeless girl in his arms. The doors spring open on their own, and light blooms on the console grate as the Doctor steps over the threshold; warm golden light, relief and welcome, the untameable vortex-driven matrix taking heart from the return of her fragile human and idiotic Time Lord.

“Oi,” the Doctor murmurs, but the engines are already grinding to life, taking them somewhere – somewhere warm, probably, and near the sea. Exactly where they need to go.


	19. how wide the world is

It’s not even that Leadworth is small (though it is), and it’s not even really that it’s ordinary (though it is that, too), because everywhere is ordinary – everywhere Amy's been, at least, and probably everywhere in England. Maybe Amy’s childhood would have been more interesting if she had been able to persuade Aunt Sharon to move to New York City, or Bombay, or Tokyo, somewhere with colors that didn’t exist in the English countryside and where no one made fun of anyone’s accent because everyone spoke different languages that sounded like the sea, or the harsh calls of some outlandish bird. But the only place Aunt Sharon ever took her was to the school building, which was built of concrete blocks and bright plastic, and always smelled faintly of spinach and ammonia.

There’s not a lot of sky in Leadworth, or any hidden passageways or caves, or even any gnarled, dark woods where a young girl wandering on her own in the forbidden twilight might reasonably expect to encounter fairies, or trolls, or mysterious blue boxes. And after Aunt Sharon, encouraged by the second psychiatrist, finally works up the nerve and cunning to take away her books, there’s nothing interesting left in Amelia’s world outside her dreams.

You can do a lot of dreaming in fourteen years.


	20. nothing to cook

“Biscuits,” Rory says with his head in the cupboard of the TARDIS’ small kitchen. “At least, I think those are biscuits. They’re sort of…greenish. Look a bit unhealthy, actually.”

“Got something live over here!” Amy shouts from atop the counter. She ducks to avoid something rose-pink and slimy that leaps out of the top drawer and lands with a plop on the floor. It’s a bit froglike, Rory observes as it hops away. The worst thing is, some part of him is actually considering trying to tackle it and take a bite. He sighs and opens another cupboard.

They gather everything that looks edible into a small, unappetizing pile in the middle of the floor; alien crisp packets, speckled fruit in odd shapes, the greenish biscuits, a bag of what looks like rice but might actually be tiny eggs, and three boxes of cheap teabags. 

“I don’t get it,” Rory says, as Amy nudges the pile with one foot and makes a face. “What does the Doctor eat? He must eat, I’ve seen him eat. Doesn’t he live here?”

“Yeah, time traveler’s bachelor pad,” Amy snorts. “Don’t tell me you had more food than this in your apartment before we were married.”

“Uh, yeah, I did, actually,” Rory says. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you were the one who never had anything except all those cans of frosting – Oi!”

The Doctor, who had attempted to slink unnoticed past the kitchen door, stops and straightens his bow tie guiltily. “Ponds?”

“Where do you keep your food? Proper food,” Rory demands. “We can’t find anything but rubbish.”

“Of course not, this is the tertiary auxiliary kitchen! You want the main kitchen,” the Doctor says.

“And where’s that?”

“Ah. Er. I, um, just blew it up.”

“Of course you did,” Rory sighs. Amy just laughs.


	21. friends in life and death

“He won’t always be like this, you know,” River tells Amy over coffee on Trapper’s Moon. The Doctor has dragged Rory across the street to look at a cage of dancing spiders, and Amy glances out the window at the backs of their heads.

“What do you mean, ‘like this’?” she asks.

“He’ll change someday,” says River. “He’s a Time Lord, and when a Time Lord dies –” Amy shudders, fighting that thought with her whole body, and River reaches out and touches her lightly on the wrist. “I know, Amy, but this is important. When a Time Lord dies, they… change. He’ll get a new face, a new body. He’ll still be the Doctor, but…” she shakes her head. “He’ll see everything differently. Even you.”

Amy fidgets with her cup for a moment, then looks up, and River isn’t at all surprised by the fire in her eyes. “So he’ll change,” Amy says flatly. “What’ll that matter? He’ll still have me.”

“Even if you don’t have him?”

“Of course,” Amy says, looking out the window again. Her expression shifts from defiant anger to something softer and stronger. It’s a look that River knows well.

“Thank you,” she says softly, but Amy is watching her Doctor and her husband, and doesn’t hear.


	22. you shall see me a little while longer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Canton chapter. Spoilers for "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon".

For all the years Canton had had to prepare himself, driving away from that beach was possibly the most difficult task he’d done for the Doctor yet.

They had been so young! So young, and vibrant and fearful as young people were – as he had been. Oh, he remembered so well… and now he knew origin of the shadow that had haunted Amy’s face even when they had first met; he knew what Rory’s careful silence had been a shield against. And he knew (one last gift from the Doctor) that he, Canton, was still out there somewhere, young and rash and about to have the greatest adventure of his life.

He wondered briefly if he should have given River or Rory a message to give to his younger self – a warning, or an instruction. But then he thought of Daniel waiting for him at home, old and wrinkly now too but as sharp and handsome as ever, and he smiled to think that things would continue on their course now, and his life would unfold unchanged.

He glanced a few times into his rearview mirror, to see his future past hanging silvery low in the sky, then turned his gaze back to the road ahead.


	23. keeping up appearances

It’s been a while since she’s caught the Doctor doing anything particularly strange, so Amy isn’t really surprised when she steps out onto the balcony of a villa in Palermo to find the Doctor up on a stepladder, painting the TARDIS.

She pauses in the doorway to watch him, squinting in the dazzling Mediterranean sun. He’s found a white painter’s cap and smock somewhere, and is flinging paint with more abandon than accuracy. About a fifth of the balcony is already splattered with blue much bluer than the sea or the sky.

“Does a time machine need to be painted?” she wonders.

“No, it doesn’t,” River calls, from where she’s sunbathing safely out of range. “It’s a chameleon circuit, a disguise. The image stays static no matter what you do to it.”

“Don’t listen to them, dear,” the Doctor says loudly to TARDIS, and plants a great big kiss right between the doors.

Rory shuffles up behind Amy in the doorway, shirtless and tousle-haired. “Good morning, all,” he yawns, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing her cheek. He pauses a moment, taking in the scene. Then, to Amy; “Does he realize his lips are blue?”


	24. the youth who wanted to learn what fear is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A prequel to the events of "wise through experience".

They’re running, Rory and Amy and the Doctor, with great flaming bat-gargoyles in hot pursuit, and they’re almost back to the TARDIS when Rory trips. Hitting the ground knocks his heart into his throat and he’s going to die in the mud, roasted alive by ugly church decorations –

Then strong hands grab his collar and his shoulder and also somehow his elbow and he’s hauled upwards. It’s the Doctor, the Doctor’s turned around and come back for him, and is dragging him towards the TARDIS; Rory tries to help, and manages to get his feet back under him just in time to overbalance the Doctor and send them crashing to the floor.

Amy throws the lever and the force of the takeoff sends Rory and the Doctor rolling against the stairs, and Rory can feel the bruises forming between his ribs but he doesn’t care, his heart is still in his throat and he can feel the Doctor’s hearts hammering at him and somehow he’s ended up on top of the Time Lord, his hands braced against the floor on either side of the Doctor’s head, their chests pressed together and their legs all tangled.

And he would probably have gotten up again and stammered an apology, but the adrenaline and relief and gratitude are making everything spin and so before he can think better of it (always thinking), Rory closes his eyes and jumps.

The Doctor’s lips taste like space and strawberries and the most exquisite terror and joy and like nothing Rory’s ever known in his life.


	25. the magician and his pupil

“Now, _don’t drop them._ Dropping them will create a catastrophic temporal anomaly,” the Doctor says, handing Rory three thermocouplings. “It’s red to yellow, blue to green, easy as cake. Go ahead, give it the old what-for.”

Rory glances at the thermocouplings, then back to the Doctor. “But, I don’t – I’m not sure I –”

“Oh, come on! Have some confidence, Rory!” The Doctor grabs him by the shoulders and spins him around, shoving him towards the time rotor. “Nothing to it.”

Carefully, Rory extends the red coupling towards the yellow slot. Its legs unfold, reaching to connect –

“NO!” the Doctor roars. Rory jumps, nearly dropping the thermocoupling, but the Doctor is suddenly right behind him and grabs his wrist. “Not… like… that,” the Doctor breathes. “Here, I’ll show you.”

The Doctor’s hands are on his hips, moving him two paces to the left, and Rory thinks he’ll let go then but he doesn’t; those big hands are sliding around to the front of him, and before Rory can so much as squeak the Doctor is pressing on his abdomen, his alien skin unexpectedly cool. He’s muttering “Stomach in, chest out,” then “shoulders back” – Rory isn’t responding, so he makes the change himself – and then he steps back, admiring his handiwork.

“There, try it like that, shouldn’t do too much damage,” he says brightly. He bounds up the stairs, leaving Rory too-hot and flustered and wondering whether the Doctor can possibly be _that_ oblivious.

Something explodes up on the console, and Rory thinks gloomily that he probably can.


	26. sin and grace

“You were in Stormcage,” the Doctor says suddenly, as they’re lying on a hammock suspended in the cavernous dark of the engine room. His voice brushes River’s exposed skin like a scrap of rough velvet.

“Still am,” she says. No point arguing: strange pillow talk is par for the course, with the Doctor.

“You keep escaping.”

“Well, they locked me in. You can’t expect a girl to stay put.”

“Yes, but then you keep going back.” He raises himself on one elbow, leans over her, his eyes thoughtful. “You escape, but not for good. Only to have an adventure or two with me. Why not make a proper run for it?”

There’s a long silence, then the Doctor sighs. “It’s all right, you don’t have to answer. I know what you’re doing.”

River feels her lips quirk into a knowing smile, though she suddenly feels like a young, terrified, impressionable girl all over again. “And what am I doing?”

“Penance,” the Doctor says. His long, bony fingers trace her collarbone like an archaeologist uncovering a shard of something ancient and precious under a layer of dust. “You want to be forgiven.”

River closes her eyes. “Don’t we all?”


	27. what was whispered in his ear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for "The Impossible Astronaut".

The Astronaut’s blast knocks the Doctor to his knees, and he looks up across the burning beach as his hands start bleeding gold. Someone is shouting – Amy, probably. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, nearly a whisper, but he’s sure she’ll hear. She always does.

He meets her wild eyes for a second, just for a second, then can’t look anymore and his gaze darts instead to River, whose eyes are cold, cold with the shock of having lost so much that loss is no longer a shock. In this second that lasts forever he can see all of the grief he’ll cause her, all of the times he’ll make her love, make her suffer, make her learn to fight in spite of grevious wounds. Someone’s shouting, and just before the Doctor dies he watches River’s lips, waiting for her to speak that last word to absolve him, that last curse to condemn him. There’s nothing but silence round him now; still, if she says it, he’ll hear. He always does.

He wonders if she even knows it yet, his name.


	28. the wishing ring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Incredibly vague spoilers for events towards the end of s5, and the episode "The Pandorica Opens".

Before their wedding, it had always been Rory telling Amy to be careful with her engagement ring, Rory worrying about it getting lost or tarnished or left by the wayside somewhere because Amy had wanted to show it off. He was always afraid of her habit of running roughshod over the things she loved.

After the wedding (and her death and the Pandorica and the end of the universe), things were different.

Now Amy wears the plain wedding band with pride, but the engagement ring is shut in its little velvet box, never on her finger but never far away. She tells Rory that she doesn’t want to lose it, which is true; for their first two months in Leadworth she carries it with her constantly, as a charm against misfortune, and she takes it to America in the bottom of her knapsack. Rory, being preoccupied with other things, never bothers to ask her about it. So Amy never tells him about how that ring helped bring him back, kept him from slipping entirely out of her memory even when he hadn’t existed anymore, and it’s silly and superstitious but she can’t help believing that maybe someday it’ll help bring him back to her again, and she needs to guard it carefully until then.

She knows that Rory will come back to her always, with or without some silly ring. But she also knows fairy tales, and she knows that tokens of love are powerful things and not to be taken lightly.


	29. who gives his own goods shall receive it back tenfold

The Doctor bounds out of the TARDIS into the Ponds’ front hall. “Supernova all sorted! How are we doing here, then? Everyone having a good time?”

His Ponds are waiting for him, looking as though they are having the opposite of a good time. On the other hand, the couple of dozen squirrel-sized purple aliens skittering around their feet look to be having the time of their lives.

“Four days!” Amy bursts out. “I can’t believe you left us alien-sitting for four days! You said two hours!”

“Oh, come on, Amy, they’re harmless! And they’re cute, look –” The Doctor bends down to pick up one of the creatures. It lifts a tentacle and squelches at him. “Well, harmless anyway,” he mutters, pulling his hand back.

“They ate our kitchen table!”

“Well that was very naughty of them!” The Doctor turns to the nearest clump of creatures. “That’s hardly the proper way for full-grown Graaxlfes to behave, is it?” To Amy’s amazement, the little creatures stop clambering over the walls and gather on the floor, hanging their eyestalks in shame. “No! It isn’t!” the Doctor says. “And you’re going to give the nice Ponds their table back right away, aren’t you?”

The creatures nod.

“Williamses,” Rory says automatically, but no one pays any mind. The creatures skitter out into the space between the humans and the Doctor, humming a high note. There’s a moment of shimmery strangeness, and a light so bright that Amy is forced to close her eyes, and when she opens them there’s a huge table blocking the hallway, made entirely of blue-white diamond.

“Very good!” the Doctor says, tickling the nearest creature. “Atomic matrix reconfiguration,” he says to Amy and Rory. He turns back to the TARDIS and flings the doors open, ushering all the Graaxlfes inside. “Goodbye, Ponds!” he shouts over his shoulder, and he’s gone.

The table is still there, still solid, still sparkling faintly in the morning light.

After a while Rory says “It’s a good thing we didn’t tell him about the car.”


	30. the man who competes with the devil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for "A Good Man Goes to War".

The Doctor’s been to a lot of museums, but the Delirium Archive is his _favorite_.

It’s even better after he knows what it is, after he’s battled at Demon’s Run and then gets to come back to it long after all traces of military aggression have been obliterated by informative little brass plaques and gift shops. It’s so much better when he gets to return in triumph to the last holdout of the Headless Monks, arm-in-arm with the fantastic woman they wanted to weaponize and then destroy.

He doesn’t like to gloat, usually, or savor the downfall of his enemies. But for River’s sake, he’ll make an exception.

“Oh! That one’s mine – and that one, and that one,” he says, spinning around the Nautilus chamber. “I only messed about a bit with that one, the plaid didn’t suit me, I told them, I said, just wait until bagpipes come along! And that one – oh, that’s just wrong, why even bother if you’re not going to mention the badger…”

River’s leaning on the doorframe, watching him with a faint smile. “You know, Doctor, I’ve never asked you,” she says after a moment. “This game, this keeping score – who’s on the other side?”

The Doctor doesn’t turn to answer her, but as he leans over a pair of incaradine tablets, she hears him mutter a word in Gallifreyan. He’s been teaching her their language, bit by bit, but she’s never heard this word before. It has components of _death_ – but also _history_ , and _stillness_ , and something like _entropy_.

“Ah,” she says quietly. “I see.”


	31. the partition of an inheritance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was written before "Let's Kill Hitler" and all that Mels business. Spoilers for River Song's identity.

“What am I?” Melody Pond asks the Doctor on her eighteenth birthday, when he arrives to take her away from her parents, from Earth, because she’s being hunted and her home can’t protect her anymore.

“You’re human, or very nearly,” he tells her. “You’ve got to know what that means.”

The colonists of the Gamma Forest are human, or very nearly, which is why the Doctor drops Melody off to enroll at the university there. Her few brief years in Leadworth had taught her family; her parents had taught her about good so deep that it had no dark side, about good without rules or reservations. In the Gamma Forest she learns more human things: lust and love and the lines between them; death, and mortal fear of death; courage in the face of mortal fear.

Then one day the Doctor comes back for her, and between adventures he teaches her their language, the whorls in which dream and time alone can be truly expressed. He teaches her their history, the religion of gods, how to understand her strange new time-senses and listen to the stars singing their oldest names. Then he takes her to the Medusa Cascade, or what’s left of it, and it sings back to her her own name; one she’s never heard before but has always lived, and will continue to live while star after star burns out.

What am I? she asks the Void, which knows her like an old, old friend. The Void envelopes her as though she was a Time Lord (or very nearly).

“What am I, Doctor?” she asks, centuries later, at the Singing Towers.

He has wept many times that night, but now it seems as though it might be for joy. “The very best of us,” he tells her. “Human and Gallifreyan and the very, very best.”


	32. why it turned winter

It isn’t until Hvezda that the Doctor is finally forced to admit that there might, possibly, be a downside to being ginger. It makes one six times more likely to get sacrificed to a ravenous god of volcanoes, for instance.

But those are just odds, and if there was ever one for beating the odds it’s Amelia Pond. The Doctor hasn’t got halfway up the slope of Mount Look-a-Monster-With-Really-Big-Teeth (roughly translated) when he catches sight of Amy coming the other way, alone and covered in ash and wondrously uncaptured. He doesn’t stop his charge, doesn’t even slow down, and throws his arms around her so forcefully that a white cloud of ash puffs out from her skin. His hands stir up more ash as he clenches his fingers into the back of her jacket, and he can feel the fine drift of it tickling the back of his neck as it settles over his head. She coughs, turning her face into his shoulder to avoid breathing the stuff in, and he’s never been so glad for a respiratory bypass.

“Amy, magnificent Amy,” he says. “How did you escape?”

“I shouted ‘look over there, it’s the volcano god’, and when they all went down on their knees I ran,” she says. “They’ll be coming after me soon.”

“No,” the Doctor says. “They won’t.”

“Why? What did you do?” Amy follows the Doctor’s eyes up, to the grim clouds over the tip of the volcano which suddenly seem a lot less grim than they did half an hour ago.

Then there’s a cold wisp on her cheek and she realizes that the white swirling about her isn’t ash; it’s snow.

“Prophecy from the gods,” the Doctor says, as the snow thickens into flurries around them. He brushes his fingertips across her cheek, chasing off a stray snowflake. “No more sacrifices,” he says quietly. “No more capturing and killing. It’s over.” He presses a kiss to her temple, tasting ash and smoke, then takes her hand. “Now to go back four hundred years and give them the prophecy. Come along, Pond.”


	33. open sesame

In the Library, the Doctor discovers that he can open the TARDIS doors with a snap of his fingers. That is, of course, the coolest of cool gestures, recognized as a signal of cool on 83% of inhabited planets, including a few dozen whose inhabitants don’t even have fingers. Still, he experiments with whistling, and then with tap-dancing, because you never know, do you? (Apparently the TARDIS knows, since she seems strangely unimpressed by the Doctor’s best dancing. He had always suspected that time machines had terrible taste.)

River actually dug up the manual from somewhere (“They make these out of neutron-filament parchment, Doctor, a supernova won’t even singe the pages!”) and so she opens the doors the proper Time Lord way, with a temporal-harmonic command in Gallifreyan. The TARDIS responds like a well-programmed Type 40 should, and in return River makes sure to fly her through the sweetest rift in the quadrant.

For Amy, the TARDIS is never locked. She travels with the Doctor for months without wondering about it before he tells her that she she’s been thinking home and belonging so strongly at the TARDIS that it breaks through the outer shielding, overcomes the natural human barriers to telepathy, and activates the door-control circuits directly. “A mind that opens locks,” he tells her, grinning. “It’s a good thing you ran off with me, Amelia Pond.”

Rory just knocks, until the Doctor gives him a key.


	34. the girl as helper in the hero's fight

The Doctor wakes up lying on a cold flat surface. That’s good; waking up is good, even if his knees and ribs are doing their best to convince him otherwise. Cages, though, are not so good, especially when they have their bars pressed rudely into the side of face, and are swinging about five meters off the floor of the Imperial Palace on Knigurtionda.

From far below comes a soft beep. Then a gravelly, unfamiliar voice says “’e’s all right, Miss. They roughed ‘im up a little, but on the ‘ole, nothing to worry about.”

“Thanks, Grubwin,” says another voice, Amy’s voice. Light blooms and expands between the Doctor’s hearts, rushing out into his bruised limbs, pushing back the pain. He opens his eyes, risking the vertigo of seeing the palace floor spin through the bars of the cage, and tries to call out that he’s so glad she’s alive, she’s magnificent, and she should get him down now, please, but the only thing to come out of his mouth is a strangled groan.

“Oi, Doctor! You awake up there?”

The Doctor flails into something like a sitting position and grabs the bars. “Amy!” he wheezes. “Amy, brilliant Amy, you’re okay – the Hive Queen, did she –”

“Her shuttle just left,” Amy says.

“The generator?”

“Completely stabilized.”

“Good. Good.” The Doctor slumps forward against the bars. “How did that happen, exactly?”

“Once you’d been knocked out, it was all pretty easy, actually,” Amy drawls. “Turns out the Queen and I had quite a bit in common.”

The gigantic, trollish Grubwin taps her respectfully on the shoulder. “Should I crank ‘im down, Miss?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe he could stand to stay up there a little longer. Learn a lesson or two about – hmm, what was it? Oh, I remember — letting people get captured to ‘keep them out of the way’!”

After Amy’s stormed out, the Doctor looks down into Grubwin’s reproachful tusks. “I wanted to make sure she didn’t get hurt,” he croaks.

“I fink she could say the same for you, mate,” Grubwin replies. “‘Specially just now. ‘s quite sweet, really, if’n you ask me.”


	35. little brother and little sister

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, imagine this is an alternate universe where Amy and Rory had another child. Spoilers(?) for River Song's identity.

“All right, Doctor,” Amy says, crossing her arms. “ _Explain_.”

“Well. Right. You see, imagine a great big – no, that isn’t it at all, actually, it was more like a –” he pauses, panic beginning to show on his soot-smudged face. He runs his fingertips over the ragged holes in his jacket, reaches up to nervously straighten his bow tie only to find that it isn’t there.

After a minute under Amy’s glare, he gives up. “She started it.”

“Did not!” Annabelle cries. “He said there was a swimming pool –”

“There is a swimming pool!” the Doctor insists. “She was the one who wanted to go through the twinkling garden –”

“—he pushed me –”

“—I told her not touch the twinkles, I _told_ her they were superdimensional mini-vortexes –”

Amy holds up a hand, and the Doctor and Annabelle fall silent. “Doctor, she’s six,” Amy points out. “Of course if you took her to a twinkling place…”

“Yeah, and I’m nine-hundred and eighty, don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

“Hey! I heard that,” Amy warns. She stares down at the disheveled, dirty Time Lord and little girl for a moment. Indistinguishable wide-eyed pouts stare back. “Belle, go play with your sister,” she sighs.

“Yes, Mum!” Annabelle chirps. She sticks her tonuge out at the Doctor, then runs off down the corridor to the console room, calling for Melody.

“Don’t I get to go play?” the Doctor asks, intensely interested. Amy stares. “It’s just that… they’re probably going to _color_ ,” he explains. “With pandimensional crayons, too.”


	36. invisible voices

"And the scariest part," the Doctor says, "is that these creatures have _invisible voices_!"

Rory pauses with a forkful of pancakes halfway to his mouth and considers that for a second. "Hang on, I'm pretty sure that makes no sense," he says. "Aren't voices always invisible?"

Amy, who had been slumped over in her chair, focused half on the Doctor and half on drawing designs in the syrup on her plate, suddenly sits bolt upright. "It's a butterfly garden!"

Rory and the Doctor both turn to look at her, the one in bewilderment, the other trying not to look guilty. "What are you talking about?" Rory asks.

"He's trying to get us to go to a butterfly garden," Amy says. "No, think about it. A zoo full of flying monsters in all kinds of brilliant colors -- but small enough that they won't hurt you --"

"With scales on their wings," Rory adds, comprehension dawning. "That exist symbiotically with the plants. _And_ have 'invisible voices', whatever that's supposed to mean..."

"Admit it," Amy demands, turning to the Doctor in triumph. "'You've run out of ideas for planets, and you want to go look at butterflies!"

"I haven't _run out of planets_ , Pond," the Doctor says. "Do you listen to yourself? And -- well, butterflies are cool. So what?" He straigtens up a little and sniffs, adjusting his bowtie. "If I do admit it, what then?"

Rory and Amy share a look during which they have one of those incredibly complex, lightning-fast silent conversations that married people do so well. Finally Rory looks over at the Doctor. "We took a school trip to a great butterfly garden near Brighton when I was a kid," he offers.

The Doctor beams.


	37. three words at the grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for "Vincent and the Doctor".

“It's all wrong,” Amy says softly. She pulls her jacket tighter around her shoulders and shivers, despite the warm breeze that gusts over the hill, bearing the scent of distant wildflowers. "Look at them, Doctor."

The Doctor doesn’t want to look at them. Instead he rocks back and forth on his heels in the thick wild grass of the hillside, looking up at the overcast sky, over at the distant steeple and terraced rooftops of the town – anywhere but down. He doesn’t want to see the meager funeral procession, the four men staggering under the weight of the simple wooden coffin they bear, all dressed in black, all somber and silent and gaunt.

“It shouldn’t be like this," Amy says, and the quiet despair in her voice stills the Doctor’s fidgeting, draws his wandering eyes to her face. “It’s awful,” she murmurs. “Vincent was so brilliant, so _bright_ , and this is just – it’s all wrong!”

“Of course it’s wrong. Funerals always get it wrong,” the Doctor sighs. “You try to take the whole of someone’s life, all their good things and bad things and weird things and compress it all into a twenty-minute sermon and a wooden box…” It's bound to go wrong. That’s why he never comes to these things, why he always tries to leave in time to keep the memory of his friends as alive, and free, and happy – so that he can imagine them staying that way forever. Which, in some sense in which time is always referential and repeating itself, they do.

But Amy doesn’t need to hear that in one eternal moment of time Vincent will always be drinking wine in the café, and in another he will be always painting, and in another always lifting that gun to his chest. The Doctor glances sideways at her to see that she's crying, very softly. He reaches out and takes her hand, pointing with the other up at the dimming on the far horizon. There's very little light pollution in nineteenth-century rural France, and the first star of the evening is already burning bright and clear.

“Come on,” the Doctor says softly. “Let’s go to that one.”

Amy casts one last bleak look at the funeral procession, then nods.

In the silence just before they turn away, the bells of Auvers-sur-Oise begin to chime.


	38. the dead shall remain dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More spoilers for "Vincent and the Doctor", because apparently I am just full of Vincent van Gogh feels lately. Can function as a prequel or a sequel to the previous chapter, "three words at the grave".

Three hundred thousand years and five galaxies away from the death of Vincent Van Gogh, the Doctor tries to tell Amy about fixed points.

It is, he says, like gravity. Or like that thing you get when you’re running across the tiled antechamber of the Duchess of Quirm, and you try to stop, but you can’t because you’ve forgotten to take your socks off, and you just slide and then possibly fall over. Momentum, that’s the one. It’s like what momentum would be, if momentum was anchored in five visible dimensions and rolled really thin in the other six.

Fine, call it momentum then. The thing is you’ve got time, all these possible and impossible and semipossible and demipossible events spooling out in all their wibbly-wobbly glory, and no he can’t draw a picture of it, there aren’t even crayons in those colors, and anyway that’s not the point. The point is, most of the time you can twang them about like rubber bands and twist them and twirl them any way you like – well, he can anyway, because he’s the Doctor – but sometimes you can’t. There are points – explosions, births and deaths, sometimes only sentences -- that stick. Only they don’t stick like a sticky thing sticks to another sticky thing, they stick like a sticky thing would stick to, say, an enraged triceratops.

He tells her about his time-sense, about all the loops and whorls and workaday paradoxes that weave nets from heart to heart to brain and back again. He tells her (very briefly) about his people, about their Responsibilities, about how they used to shore up whole histories, whole branching timelines, around these immovable points like you would build supports for the ceiling of a cathedral --

“So that’s it, then,” Amy says, interrupting him. She pulls her knees in to her chest and wraps her arms around them, making herself smaller. “You just somehow know Vincent is one of these fixed points, and that means we can’t help him. We can’t go back and, and do something –”

“Look, it isn’t that simple,” the Doctor says. He pauses for a moment, wondering how to tell her about Reapers sterilizing a wound in the skin of the universe, about suicide and madness in snow.

“No, it’s all right. I get it, I do,” Amy says, her voice choked with an anger that makes the Doctor think she really does understand. “Never thought you’d be one to believe in destiny, Doctor.”

“It’s not – look, it’s not _destiny_ ,” he says carefully. “It’s just…even when you’ve got a time machine, there are some things that can’t be changed. And even if you could, even if you did, you would cave in entire timelines. You would alter the course of galaxies, if not the universe, forever.”

Somehow, with the mud from Vincent’s boots still on the TARDIS floor and Amy’s silence hanging in the air like an accusation, the Doctor’s grand pronouncements fall a little flat.

Finally Amy shifts and looks up at him. “Changing the course of history, that doesn’t sound so bad,” she says softly.

The Doctor only shakes his head. “The consequences would be unfathomable.”


	39. the snare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something I've been thinking about for a while. Based off the comment Amy makes to the Doctor in "The Power of Three".

Trying to count up the time they've spent with the Doctor is Rory's idea, at first. "Don't you want to know?" he asks, over tea in the back garden. "Aren't you curious? About how old we really are, I mean. And how much we've... missed."

The idea makes Amy angry for reasons she doesn't understand, and Rory drops it under her protests that it doesn't matter, it's ridiculous to think about, what would be the point? But he's patient, and he doesn't seem surprised when she comes back to him a week later with her lips pressed together in a thin line and her head high, troubled but defiant. "All right, then," she says, "let's figure it out."

It was never going to be easy, but neither one of them anticipated how hard it would be -- staying up late into the night, night after night, counting, adding -- recalling all their adventures and trying to translate them into slow time, trying to separate individual fragments out of their scattered, glittering, distorted lives. They spend weeks making lists, Amy at the magazine and Rory at the hospital, remembering and writing down all their adventures with their mad Doctor and comparing notes over Chinese takeout.

In the evenings, they argue. Did it just feel like it lasted forever because it was so wondrous and strange and terrifying? Or did they actually spend a month living in a monastery/circus on Saturn? Was a day and a night on Venus comparable to a day and a night on Earth? Wasn't it longer? How long does it take to celebrate Halloween on Arcturus? (They leave out the time he spent guarding the Pandorica; they decide early on that alternate universes and reboots don't count.)

There are tears and laughter and negotiations, and cups of tea that probably number in the hundreds, and it takes them a few weeks but finally they settle on a number.

"We think it's been ten years," Amy tells the Doctor, months later. Ten extra years, Amy calls it (though Rory keeps pointing out that that's not quite accurate). Ten years outside the sphere of all they know. 

All it takes is one step onto the TARDIS console grate and you're snapped up, swept along for ten years while Time rushes past you in a dizzying cascade, and even after ten years Amy and Rory will take that step again and again.


	40. hospitality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all adventures are created equal.

“Ugh, I’m so _bored_ ,” Amy groans. The Doctor, sitting on the only couch with his nose buried in a book, doesn’t respond, so Amy flops down next to him, leaning on his arm so she can see the page. “What’s that book about, anyway? You’ve been reading it for ages.”

“It’s only been two hours, forty-five minutes and, oh… twenty seconds,” the Doctor says dimissively, without looking up. “And it’s not a book.”

“It looks like a book,” Amy says, though it doesn’t, at least not on the inside. Instead of letters and words, the pages are covered in some sort of squiggly symbolic alphabet that moves in slow, swaying rhythms while she watches it, like tree-branches caught in a gentle breeze.

“It’s a sort of musical score,” the Doctor says, flicking the page. The next one is covered in interlocking spirals. “I found it under the bed, behind all the feathers. Probably came from Tlon. Lovely people, the Tlonians. No concept of time -- makes for a nice change, though it’s a nightmare trying to catch a train.” He shrugs and wiggles a little, jostling Amy’s head where it’s come to rest on his shoulder. “Move over, Pond, you’re going to cramp my reading arm.”

Amy grumbles a little, but sits up so the Doctor can shift into a more comfortable position before lying back down, her feet dangling over the edge of the sofa and her head nearly in his lap. “Why couldn’t we have gone to Tlon instead?” she sighs, staring morosely at the room they’re in – nominally a ‘hospitality cubicle’, and a prison cell in all but name. It’s a very nice prison cell, to be sure -- it has more in common with an extremely spartan London apartment than an actual dungeon – but it’s still not exactly an exotic, otherworldly locale. Amy can feel her mind slowing down just looking at it; gray carpet, unrelievedly gray walls, fogged window looking out on a cloudy gray sky over a restless slate-gray sea.

The Doctor turns another page. Still without looking up, he starts gently carding his fingers through her hair, soothing her restless fidgeting. “I thought you wanted a vacation,” he says.

“Yeah. I want a _vacation_ , not a quarantine,” Amy says. “I just want to be somewhere interesting without having to run around and save it for once.”

“Who said this isn’t interesting?” the Doctor sniffs, as though he’s offended by the implication. “You’re on a planet orbiting a binary star system, five hundred million years in your future… and yeah, all right, it’s dull to the point of death, I know,” he admits. “But the door’s deadlocked sealed and the window’s unbreakable, so we’re stuck in here for the duration. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless I can convince the Praxians that we’re only the quadruped larval forms of a sextapedal adult insectiform,” he says thoughtfully. “How good are you at forming cocoons?”

“Must’ve missed that day in school,” Amy says, fighting back a yawn.

“Well. Fat lot of good you are.” The Doctor’s voice is teasing, and his fingers are getting tangled in her hair. The gentle tugging, the warm tickle of his fingertips on her scalp is almost hypnotic, in a weird way, and Amy’s finding it difficult to keep her eyes open. She wonders vaguely if he’s pulling some kind of Time Lord mind-trick on her, then remembers that she hasn’t had a proper sleep since Rafalxis, which was at least two galaxies and three jars of custard ago.

She stifles another yawn, closing her eyes against the gray day. The whole world narrows down to nothing but the Doctor’s soft touch and the crash of the distant sea. “Wake me up when they let us out,” she murmurs. “Then we’ll go somewhere interesting, yeah?”

“Yeah,” the Doctor agrees. “I’m fed up with vacation, too.”


	41. the girl who patched her apron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More Jenny/Vastra because reasons.

"I am sorry, my dearest," Vastra sighs, running her hand across the fine soft apron that Jenny has laid out on the table for repairs. She brushes her clawed fingers gingerly over the long gashes she'd torn in it in her haste to get it out of the way the previous evening.

Jenny shoos her away, scowling in mock disappointment as she carefully aligns a patch over the holes and starts to sew. "It's nothing," she says.

"Nonsense. I know how much you liked it," Vastra says. "It will only be a few more days until we catch that Piccadilly jewel thief. The Yard has a handsome bounty on him; I'll buy you a new one."

They catch the jewel thief the next day, but Jenny manages to convince Vastra that the money can be put to more urgent uses than new aprons; there are the drawing room curtains that need replacing, and Vastra's makeshift sauna in the cellar is becoming more and more necessary -- and more expensive -- as winter draws nearer, and there are a thousand other little household things that Jenny insists are indispensible, and then six months have passed and she's still wearing the same patched apron (though not when guests are in the house).

Even years later, when they're married and rich, when Jenny can afford a different waistcoat for every criminal they catch and a new sword every month if she wants one, even then Vastra finds her industriously cleaning some corner of the house, wearing that apron with the tilted patch askew, covering the trace of her claws.


	42. the saving blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> River's career as an archaeology professor is not totally without excitement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how River's tenure as a professor fits into her timeline now, but I have always loved the idea that she earned her doctorate for real and hung out teaching classes for a while, because how awesome would that be? And I can't imagine she'd always get along well with the administrators, either.

Archaeologists, the chair of the Ancient Studies department insists, are _scientists_. They _are_ scientists, no matter what the other departments say, and scientists have _responsibilities_.

Those responsibilities include careful observation, cautious deduction, designing obtuse and impressive grant proposals, and showing great respect and care to the artifacts they study (often, this takes the form of having tea with the natives). An archaeologist's responsibilities do not include assassination, espionage, sabotage, or heroism -- not officially, anyway. But then, River's always taken every opportunity to get creative.

Of course, she is very, very clever, and it takes quite a long time for the university to realize that she's been using her archaeological field excursions for activities more strenuous than just sketching ancient runes. But the university is full of clever people, and after a while it becomes apparent to the administrators that the disappearance of plagues and tyrants wherever Professor Song goes is not a coincidence.

As far as the Ancient Studies chair is concerned, Omnaly is the final straw. It took the department _years_ to get the permits necessary to smuggle in a team to study the Grotesquely Forbidden Pyramid of Sheq, and two days after they finally manage it and land the team outside the capitol city, the power-mad Tyrant of Sheq gets mysteriously assassinated and ruins everything.

The Ancient Studies chair calls Professor Song into her office after that. "We have _responsibilities_ ," she groans. "We are observers! We're just supposed to learn about the past -- it's not our place to, to interfere! Can you not _control_ yourself?"

Professor Song had had the decency to look abashed when she entered, but now she looks up with an insolent grin. "I suppose not," she says airily. "Saving people, you know, I just can't resist. I suppose it's a family weakness."


	43. a pound of flesh

“Humans,” the Doctor says with a shudder. “You’re so…” His fingers trace the curve of the knife-wound across her stomach, not quite touching the pinkness of new scar tissue, the faint silver traceries where the surgical nanobots are dispersing, their work finished. Amy waits for him to finish his sentence, but instead he lowers his hand and glances up at her. “Does it hurt?”

“Not so much anymore,” she says, lowering her blood-soaked shirt again so the scar is hidden from view. The red rawness of it against her pale skin is making her dizzy – or maybe that’s the double-strength dose of alien painkillers they gave her before the nanobots went to work. “They’ve got good stuff, these cat-nuns. Two hours for gettin’ stabbed, that’s what I call a recovery time!”

She moves to get down off the operating table, but the painkillers are distorting her movements, making everything swim. The Doctor drops a hand onto her leg, and it feels like the heaviest thing in the world.

“Amy,” he says quietly, his gaze pinning her in place.

“Doctor,” she answers, a little uneasy.

He doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t like the way he’s looking at her – like he’s afraid she’s going to shatter into a million pieces, or break down crying or something.

“Doctor, I’m fine,” she tells him. “I’m not dyin’, it’s not your fault, so don’t you _dare_ start fussing. All right?”

“Right. Sorry,” the Doctor mutters, letting his hand drop and straightening up, transferring his gaze to the ceiling. “I hate med bays,” he says while Amy struggles to her feet. “Horrid places, not a shop to be found.” She sways, and he holds out an arm to steady her. “Come on, Pond, let’s get out of here.”

He does very well not fussing on the way back through the corridors of the ship. But later that night (or morning, there’s no distinction) on the TARDIS, as Amy lies in bed half-drowsing while the painkillers wear off, there’s a rustle of blankets and he crawls in beside her, still wearing his jacket, and buries his face in her hair. One hand inches over her hip, feeling for the telltale texture of the scar and covering it completely, like that will make it vanish from her skin. “No more knives,” he murmurs distantly. “New rule. Never, ever, ever. Knives are bad. No, knives are _worse_.”

“Right, got it,” Amy mumbles, more than half asleep.

“No more getting hurt at all,” the Doctor declares. “You humans… you’re so...” _Human_ , he thinks. But he doesn’t say it.


	44. a lazy girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A prequel to the events of "hospitality".

In all the universe, in all of time and space, all Amy Pond wants is a simple beach – sand, sun, surf, none of them infested with any sort of terribly dangerous alien or jellyfish or toxic waste or anything else. But Rio turns into Wales, heading for the Golden Shores of Rasalhague in the 5th century somehow strands them on a muddy moon of Sirius 3, and Amy still can’t suppress a shudder whenever she thinks about the Bermuda disaster.

Finally they manage a landing on the neon-and-starlight beach of Space Florida. “Oh, thank God,” she says, as she steps out of the TARDIS to feel the warm sand between her toes.

The Doctor comes out behind her and lets the TARDIS doors swing shut. He’s got a flowery towel draped over one arm, and is clad in what Amy can only assume are some kind of alien, futuristic swimming trunks. “Time for a vacation!” he says, sounding quite proud of himself.

The beach is flooded by a tremendous, blinding flash of light as the largest casino on the block disintegrates, leaving a huge, gently smoking crater. There’s a moment of stunned silence; then the sirens start up, and the screaming, and the noise of engines as silver helicopters converge on the site from all directions, shining floodlights and shouting incomprehensibly through megaphones. The debris in the crater is glowing green.

“Working vacation,” the Doctor amends, tossing his towel over his shoulder. Amy sighs.


End file.
